News You Can Bruise for 2009 December 29

Tue Dec 29 2009 10:19 Today's Pictures: Museum Showdown: No 2009 gallery today. Instead, it's a transatlantic museum showdown. In which museum was I able to take more cool pictures in 2008, the British Museum or the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Which museum-filling technique yields better artifacts: imperialist exploitation or robber-baron bequests? Whose cuisine will reign supreme?

vs.

I think I prefer the British Museum set, but that's because I see most of the best things in the Met set (the hilarious Book of the Dead translations, the ink cakes) every few months. Highlights: the Japan-Manchukuo Fraternity Board Game and Pieter van Laer's "Magic Scene with Self-portrait", which I'm glad I photographed in 2008 because I'm pretty sure the Met rotated it back into long-term storage.

There's at least one set of sculptures split between the museums: look in the background here and then here.

Tue Dec 29 2009 21:00 Nostalgiathon 2009: Best of Weblogs: Gaze with me into the mists of OPML... these are the weblogs I'm happiest I subscribed to in 2009. Again, not as many as in 2008.

• Sisoid's Blog of Geekery, featuring obsessive reviews of comic books and Star Trek ephemera. For instance, did you know that Cremaster 3 is not just a ripoff of Donkey Kong, it's a ripoff of an old Conan the Barbarian comic? Conan? Conan!
• The Daisy Owl web comic.
• The Geek Feminism Blog, now with extra Sumana.
• The Physics arXiv Blog.
• Two game-related weblogs: Hardcore Gaming 101 and The Grind.
• Objectively speaking, Baking Bites needs to be on this list, even though I'm not sure when I subscribed to it. Pretty much every recipe on that site is something I want to make, and often I do make it, to great acclaim.
• One of my goals in 2009 was to seriously learn about the pop culture of the 1970s, instead of dismissing it as an era covered in fake wood paneling and drenched in canola oil. My Retrospace has done... something to inform me about this time. I can't say I agree with the writer's conviction that the 1970s were the pinnacle of pop culture, but it's always good to read people with whom you disagree.
• Twitter update! So many people started using Twitter and Identica this year (even Sumana!) that my anti-Twitter position seems more William F. Buckley-esque by the day. I now subscribe to several Twitter feeds and it's possible that in the coming year I will even post. If nothing else, it seems like the simplest way to have a conversation with Kris.

  When "...Awesome Dinosaurs" was published I started searching Twitter for the phrase "awesome dinosaurs" to find people talking about the story, and I never stopped. The story talk died out months ago, but now it's a never-ending celebration of dinosaurs and their awesomeness.